HA on IOT mobile plan using old iPhone

I’m aiming for setting up a HA on a PI3B in my winter house using a cheap and limited IOT SIM card and an old mobile phone (iPhone 4 or 5s) as a router.
The challenge is to decrease the usage of the internet connection to a minimum but still allow for remote access and sending alerts

  1. Does anyone know about what configurations one shall do to make sure the phone doesn’t chat by itself on the mobile connection

  2. It’s there any special setup to do on the HA to make sure it doesn’t chat but itself on the external connection

You can probably limit HA a lot by turning auto updates off, but some access to services on the internet is still required, like NTP for setting the time on the RPi, which has no hardware real time clock.
Your issue will be the iPhone, where Apple controls it more than you do.
My suggestion is getting a cheap 4G router instead to use instead.
It will be a lot less chatty itself and there might even be options, like a firewall, to limit HA’s access if needed be.

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